Crickets call. Fireflies twinkle across the field. Children asleep. It is just about dark.
Peonies and roses still let their scents sneak out into the dark air. Fresh cut grass lingers under the dew. Pineapple plants and dirt.
A small breeze. Peepers singing in the pond and the ditch. The air cools. A few cars hush past. The solstice prepares its visit.
In winter it would have been dark for hours by now. The green world grays. Later, the moon will rise. Quiet.
Quiet.
It isn’t raining at the moment. Well, maybe it is raining a little, but barely. The sun is setting and we have that rare light when the bright sun shines under the clouds, coloring them steel gray and blasting the green hills with brightness. It won’t last long. The distant mountain tops are bright and I can see that rain falls there, and the shadows are creeping.
It has rained for a couple of days straight. I planted flower seeds with the children on Tuesday afternoon, before dinner. Then it rained. And rained. It is Friday now, about the same hour we planted the seeds. Three days of wet. I think they have gotten enough water to germinate.
I have not needed to uncoil the hose to water the garden. In fact, I have been afraid that the garden has been getting too much water. Last summer we had a wet spell that ruined some of our crops, including carrots. They rotted in the ground. Nothing I planted is so advanced that it will rot but this rain might keep some seeds from starting as I would like. We’ll have to see what happens.
A hermit thrush tosses out its flutey voice over the wet trees behind the house. It is an unassuming bird, what you might call an LBJ, a Little Brown Jobber, so similar to so many other bland birds. Its voice, however, stops me at times. Milton and Shakespeare and all those other dead English bards wrote about the nightingale, another thrush, whose voice trilled through the woods with sweetness. I am sure they would have written their odes to the hermit thrush had they lived in Vermont.
We will likely get more rain showers over the next couple of days, but I am hoping the sun will come out to feed the new leaves on our squash plants and to warm the soil so the flowers will grow. But that won’t happen until tomorrow. Right now the land quiets. The air is still, filled with moisture, heavy. A robin adds to the thrush’s song. Spring peepers and wood frogs sing out from the pond over the hill. The light grows grayer.
It is not raining, but the rain has set the scene for a perfect early evening in spring. Time to slide on some boots and head out there to smell it and feel it.
After dinner I checked the NOAA website, as I often do, to see what might be in store in the next few days. It told me to expect rain tonight. I said this to my son. His response: “I want to hear it start raining.”
After I put him to bed tonight, it started raining. He missed it by maybe ten minutes. He may even have been awake still when the rain started to fall. Now it drips onto the deck, slowly drumming away the paint. I will go to bed listening to that.
Maybe it will still be raining in the morning. My little guy can listen to it then as he wakes. If the rain has stopped, my guess is he will have forgotten his comment from the previous night. Another day it will start raining, he will listen to it and, even though he does not know I am watching, he will plaster on a big old grin.
Mercury on the Move 